"Please 'm, Mr. and Mrs. Benbow are here. They're in the drawing-room.

They said they'd wait a bit to see if you came back."

Ada had foreseen that, whatever their superficially indifferent demeanour as members of the powerful ruling caste, her master and mistress would be struck all of a heap by this piece of news. And they were. For the Benbows did not pay chance calls; in the arrangement of their lives every act was neatly planned and foreordained. Therefore this call was formal, and behind it was an intention.

"_I_ can't see them. I can't possibly, dear," Janet murmured, as it were intimidated. "I'll run back home."

Hilda replied with benevolent firmness:

"No you won't. Come upstairs with me till they're gone. Edwin, you go and see what they're after."

Janet faltered and obeyed, and the two women crept swiftly upstairs.

They might have been executing a strategic retirement from a bad smell.

The instinctive movement, and the manner, were a judgment on the ideals of the Benbows so terrible and final that even the Benbows, could they have seen it, must have winced and doubted for a moment their own moral perfection. It came to this, that the stricken fled from their presence.

"'What they're after'!" Edwin muttered to himself, half resenting the phrase; because Clara was his sister; and though she bored and exasperated him, he could not cla.s.s her with exactly similar boring and exasperating women.

And, throwing down his cap, he went with false casual welcoming into the drawing-room.

Young Bert Benbow, prodigiously solemn and uncomfortable in his birthday spectacles, was with his father and mother. Immense satisfaction, tempered by a slight nervousness, gleamed in the eyes of the parents.

And the demeanour of all three showed instantly that the occasion was ceremonious. Albert and Clara could not have been more pleased and uplifted had the occasion been a mourning visit of commiseration or even a funeral.

The washed and brushed schoolboy, preoccupied, did not take his share in the greetings with sufficient spontaneity and prompt.i.tude.

Clara said, gently shocked:

"Bert, what do you say to your uncle?"

"Good afternoon, uncle."

"I should think so indeed!"

Clara of course sprang at once to the luscious first topic, as to a fruit:

"How is poor Janet bearing up?"

Edwin was very characteristically of the Five Towns in this,--he hated to admit, in the crisis itself, that anything unusual was happening or had just happened. Thus he replied negligently:

"Oh! All right!"

As though his opinion was that Janet had nothing to bear up against.

"I hear it was a _very_ quiet funeral," said Clara, suggesting somehow that there must be something sinister behind the quietness of the funeral.

"Yes," said Edwin.

"Didn't they ask _you_?"

"No."

"Well--my word!"

There was a silence, save for faint humming from Albert. And then, just as Clara was mentioning her name, in rushed Hilda.

"What's the matter?" the impulsive Hilda demanded bluntly.

This gambit did not please Edwin, whose instinct was always to pretend that nothing was the matter. He would have maintained as long as anybody that the call was a chance call.

After a few vague exchanges, Clara coughed and said:

"It's really about your George and our Bert.... Haven't you heard? ...

Hasn't George said anything?"

"No.... What?"

Clara looked at her husband expectantly, and Albert took the grand male role.

"I gather they had a fight yesterday at school," said he.

The two boys went to the same school, the new-fangled Higher Grade School at Hanbridge, which had dealt such a blow at the ancient educational foundations at Oldcastle. That their Bert should attend the same school as George was secretly a matter of pride to the Benbows.

"Oh," said Edwin. "We've seen no gaping wounds, have we, Hilda?"

Albert's face did not relax.

"You've only got to look at Bert's chin," said Clara.

Bert shuffled under the world's sudden gaze. Undeniably there was a small discoloured lump on his chin.

"I've had it out with Bert," Albert continued severely. "I don't know who was in the wrong--it was about that penknife business, you know--but I'm quite sure that Bert was not in the right. And as he's the older we've decided that he must ask George's forgiveness."

"Yes," eagerly added Clara, tired of listening. "Albert says we can't have quarrels going on like this in the family--they haven't spoken friendly to each other since that night we were here--and it's the manly thing for Bert to ask George's forgiveness, and then they can shake hands."

"That's what I say." Albert ma.s.sively corroborated her.

Edwin thought:

"I suppose these people imagine they're doing something rather fine."

Whatever they imagined they were doing, they had made both Edwin and Hilda sheepish. Either of them would have sacrificed a vast fortune and the lives of thousands of Sunday school officers in order to find a dignified way of ridiculing and crushing the expedition of Albert and Clara; but they could think of naught that was effective.

Hilda asked, somewhat curtly, but lamely:

"Where is George?"

"He was in your boudoir a two-three minutes ago, drawing," said Edwin.

Clara's neck was elongated at the sound of the word "boudoir."

"Boudoir?" said she. And Edwin could in fancy hear her going down Trafalgar Road and giggling at every house-door: "Did ye know Mrs.